The main goal of this specialization is to provide the knowledge and practical skills necessary to develop a strong foundation on information visualization and to design and develop advanced applications for visual data analysis.
This course aims at introducing fundamental knowledge for information visualization. The main goal is to provide the students with the necessary “vocabulary” to describe visualizations in a way that helps them reason about what designs are appropriate for a given problem. This module also gives a broad overview of the field of visualization, introducing its goals, methods and applications.
A learner with some or no previous knowledge in Information Visualization will get a sense of what visualization is, what it is for and in how many different situations it can be applied; will practice to describe data in a way that is useful for visualization design; will familiarize with fundamental charts to talk about the concept of visual encoding and decoding.

教學方

Enrico Bertini

Associate Professor

Cristian Felix

PhD. Candidate

腳本

Another important question here is why use a computer to visualize data? If you remember at the beginning, I've shown you a diagram that shows that data is converted or encoded in a digital visual representation using a computer. Why do we use computers to do that? Well, there are a number of advantages but there are two main advantages that I want to mention here. The first one is obviously that with a computer, we can visualize a lot of data. We can use automated algorithms that by observing some rules, dig data and transform lots of data into a visual representation. That's basically impossible to do manually once you reach a certain size. If you have millions of data points, it gets really, really hard to visualize them by hand. So that's the first reason. The second reason is that computers allow you also to interact with digital graphical representations. And that's also very, very powerful. By interacting with the computer, we can interact with the abstract world that is represented by our visualization. And as we have seen before in some of the examples that I've shown you, interacting with data is actually very, very helpful. Before I conclude, I just want to point out that even though most of the visualization projects and artifacts that you see out there are digital, there are still people who actually like drawing data with their hands. And a beautiful example is the project called Dear Data, that has been developed by Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec, an extremely successful project where they have been sending each other cards depicting some personal information and drawn by hand in these cards. And ultimately, after one year of sending cards to each other, they collected all this information in a beautiful book that is called Dear Data. So if you're interested in that, I suggest you to take a look at hand-drawn visualizations.